Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo wasn’t the first opera, Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1598) bears that honour. However, L’Orfeo is the earliest opera that is still on our opera stages, and for an opera to hold our attention for over 400

Starting with work that is made up of a set of 7 solo piano pieces and concluding with a piano duet, Carnaval das crianças (Children’s Carnival) of 1919, Heitor Villa Lobos (1887-1959) created a larger work for piano and orchestra

Joyful tunes by Blas Galindo, Juan Pablo Contreras, Jose Pablo Moncayo and Aleksey Igudesman Mexico has a vibrant musical history full of different musical styles and influences. Mariachi music is one of them. Mariachi refers to both the genre of

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) was a seminal figure in 19th-century musical and critical thought. He was a visionary composer and seasoned journalist, a cultured man of letters and a musical genius who eventually succumbed to mental illness. An individual of incredible

Prometheus, so it is told in Greek mythology, gave humanity the gift of fire. That creative spark gave humankind the ability to run its own affairs, and it awoke a consciousness that once only belonged to the gods. Human were

To begin his new neo-classical period, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) took a story by Alexander Pushkin and had Boris Kochno, Serge Diaghilev’s personal secretary, create a libretto for a little one-act comic opera. In Pushkin’s poem, a widowed mother and her

In 1936, the French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) wrote incidental music for Le médécin volant (The Flying Doctor), a play by Charles Vildrac based on Molière’s play of the same name, which uses Italian commedia dell’arte characters. The title of

We were listening to a bit of Bill Evans the other day and something struck us as very familiar about it. We heard, of all things, an odd bass line, played very slow – descending. And then the trumpets came